Signals Inbox·July 28, 2026·FinTech

Who is the next Stripe?

Airwallex is the closest thing to the next Stripe: a fast-growing global finance platform spanning payments, accounts, foreign exchange, cards, billing and embedded finance, but without Stripe’s developer pull or early grip on US startups.

Q1What does “the next Stripe” actually mean?

The next Stripe would become the financial infrastructure underneath thousands of other businesses.

Sheer size would not be enough. We would expect four things at the same time. Developers should be able to start using it without a long sales process. The platform should follow customers from their first payment to billing, tax, fraud, treasury, cards and international expansion. It should control enough licences and local connections to work across many countries. Finally, other software companies should be able to build their own financial products on top of it.

That definition rules out some impressive businesses. A corporate-card company can earn billions without controlling merchant payments. A bank-account platform can move huge sums without becoming the system developers use to launch online businesses. An enterprise payment processor can rival Stripe in volume while relying on large sales contracts instead of developers choosing it on their own.

We are looking for the company that most closely combines Stripe’s developer appeal, global reach, product breadth and ability to grow with its customers. Airwallex currently comes closest among emerging private companies.

Q2Can anyone still catch Stripe today?

Catching Stripe today would require winning a new part of finance, because matching its existing payments business head-on is already unrealistic for a young challenger.

Stripe’s latest annual letter said businesses on its platform generated $1.9 trillion in volume during 2025, up 34% in one year. Its latest employee share sale valued the company at $159 billion. Stripe also said its revenue-management products are approaching a $1 billion annual run rate, while 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80% of the Nasdaq 100 use its services.

The scale gap is only part of the problem. Stripe keeps adding products around the payment relationship. Billing, tax, fraud tools, marketplaces, issuing, treasury, stablecoins and AI-commerce infrastructure now sit inside the same platform. At its latest Sessions conference, the company announced 288 products and features. Recent customer announcements involving OpenRouter, Lovable, Mercor and ElevenLabs also show that Stripe is capturing a large share of the new AI-company wave.

A challenger needs a route around Stripe’s strongest position. Airwallex is attacking through cross-border accounts and global financial operations. Checkout.com is pushing through enterprise payment performance. Ramp starts with corporate spending. Adyen has already built an enterprise-scale alternative.

The winner, should one emerge, will probably approach Stripe from the side and gradually take over more of the customer’s financial life.

Q3Which fintechs are real Stripe challengers now?

Only four fintechs deserve serious attention when we ask who could become the next Stripe: Airwallex, Checkout.com, Ramp and Adyen.

Airwallex has the closest product map. Checkout.com has the strongest private pure-payments business. Ramp has the fastest valuation rise and unusually strong finance-team adoption. Adyen has already reached the scale and profitability of a mature global payment platform.

Mercury and Plaid still matter, but they fail a central part of the test. Mercury is mainly a business-banking interface, while Plaid connects financial data and accounts. Brex has left the independent race following its completed sale to Capital One. None currently combines merchant acceptance, global money movement, billing, embedded finance and developer tools as broadly as the four companies below.

The figures are not perfectly comparable. Airwallex includes several kinds of financial activity, Ramp reports purchases made through its platform, and Adyen and Checkout.com focus more heavily on merchant payment volume. The table is useful for checking scale, not for ranking unlike figures as though they were identical.

The leading Stripe challengers

Q4Why is Airwallex the leading next-Stripe candidate?

Airwallex leads the emerging field because its growth is fast, its products fit together and its original cross-border infrastructure gives it room to expand into several financial categories.

In August 2024, Airwallex said its annual revenue run rate was approaching $500 million and its annualized processing volume had passed $100 billion. Its latest funding announcement reported $1.3 billion in annualized revenue and $287 billion in annualized transaction volume. In less than two years, revenue grew about 2.6 times and volume roughly 2.9 times.

The company also reported 74% year-on-year revenue growth and more than 120% growth in transaction volume in its latest disclosed period. Those rates are exceptional for a fintech already above a $1 billion revenue run rate. They also exceed the growth currently reported by Checkout.com and Adyen, though the businesses have different mixes and Adyen starts from a much larger base.

Product use is deepening at the same time. Airwallex says more than 90% of its revenue now comes from customers using more than one product. Earlier, it had said roughly half of customers used multiple products. The denominators differ, so this is not a clean time series. Still, bigger accounts are clearly buying a suite rather than turning up for an occasional foreign-exchange transfer.

Investors have marked the company up from $6.2 billion to $11 billion across two funding rounds in roughly a year. The valuation jump is secondary evidence, not the reason Airwallex leads. It does show that new investors kept paying more after reviewing a business that had already reached meaningful scale.

Q5Is Airwallex now a real financial operating system?

Airwallex already functions as a financial operating system for internationally active companies, although several of its newest AI products remain early.

A customer can receive money through local accounts, convert currencies, pay suppliers, accept card payments, issue employee cards, manage expenses, run accounts payable and bill its own customers. Platforms can create connected accounts, split funds and embed accounts, payments, payouts or cards into their products through one API.

Airwallex now sits on both sides of the ledger: money coming in and money going out.

Its recent expansion follows a clear pattern. The OpenPay acquisition added subscription management, payment orchestration and revenue analytics. The newer Leapfin acquisition adds revenue recognition and reconciliation, moving Airwallex further into the finance team’s monthly close.

A recent partnership with Visa will put Airwallex’s payments, cards and embedded-finance tools inside freight and shipping platforms. In that industry, cross-border money movement is part of the product rather than a back-office detail.

The AI layer is less mature. T:0, which aims to automate bookkeeping, forecasting, tax and reporting, was announced in private beta. Airi currently begins with one-click checkout and is meant to develop into a wallet with delegated payments, spending limits and multi-currency balances. The direction is interesting. Some of the product still has to ship.

Q6Can Airwallex’s global infrastructure challenge Stripe?

Airwallex’s global infrastructure is broad enough to challenge Stripe in cross-border business finance.

The company says it holds more than 85 licences across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. It supports transfers to more than 200 countries and reports that 676,000 businesses use Airwallex directly or through platform customers. That last figure includes indirect users, so it should not be compared with a count of businesses that signed up directly.

Recent moves show that Airwallex is still filling local gaps. It received approvals for a full commercial launch in Malaysia, acquired a licensed Korean payments company and joined the European Payments Initiative as a principal member so merchants can accept Wero.

Its Yield treasury product has also passed $1 billion in assets under administration and now gives US customers access to a J.P. Morgan Asset Management money-market fund.

This network is difficult to copy. Every new market requires regulators, banking partners, compliance teams, settlement arrangements and local payment methods. Airwallex still has uneven product availability across countries, as every global fintech does, but it has completed enough of the slow work to look like a worldwide platform rather than a regional payments company with an international website.

Q7Has Airwallex won developers yet?

Airwallex has credible developer tools. Developer adoption remains tiny beside Stripe’s.

Its API covers accounts, payments, foreign exchange, payouts, cards and spend management. Developers get sandbox accounts, webhooks, embeddable components and a newer Model Context Protocol server that can help coding agents search documentation and test integrations. The tools go much further than a normal business-finance dashboard.

The usage gap is enormous. The npm registry currently shows 2,589 other projects depending on Stripe’s main Node package and 929 depending on Stripe.js. Airwallex’s unified components SDK shows three dependents, while its Node SDK shows two.

Package data misses private code, other languages and direct API calls. It does not miss enough to explain a gap this large.

Stripe became powerful partly because a developer could choose it before the company had a finance department. Airwallex usually enters later, when a business starts dealing with multiple currencies, overseas entities, supplier payments or regional treasury. Developers can build on Airwallex today, but they rarely reach for it by default.

This is the largest missing piece in the “next Stripe” argument.

Q8Can Airwallex win the United States?

Airwallex has a credible path to a valuable US position.

It has not yet shown that American startups or software platforms see it as a default financial provider. The commitment is serious. Airwallex has made San Francisco a co-headquarters, plans to invest more than $1 billion in US operations between 2026 and 2029, and says it intends to double its American headcount to more than 400.

It has also launched US treasury products and expanded payment acceptance, giving the local team more to sell than cross-border transfers.

The harder question is when Airwallex enters the customer’s life. Its strongest opening is usually an international problem: foreign currencies, overseas suppliers, global payroll, local accounts or cross-border payouts. Stripe often arrives earlier, when a founder builds a checkout page, starts a subscription or launches a marketplace.

Current AI companies make the difference visible. Stripe has recently announced work with OpenRouter, Lovable, Gamma, Higgsfield, Mercor and ElevenLabs. These are exactly the fast-growing software businesses that could later need Airwallex’s global finance tools, yet Stripe already owns the first payment relationship.

Airwallex’s US plan works only if it gives founders a reason to adopt the platform before international complexity appears. A large investment budget and a San Francisco address help. A repeatable way to win startups early would help quite a bit more.

Q9Are Airwallex’s revenue numbers as strong as they look?

Airwallex’s revenue numbers are genuinely strong.

They still reveal less about profit quality than public-company accounts would. The company reports annualized revenue, which takes the latest revenue pace and projects it over a full year. The measure is useful for tracking growth, but it differs from revenue already earned over twelve months and from contracted software recurring revenue.

Airwallex earns across payments, foreign exchange, cards, accounts and software, so its revenue mix can also shift with transaction activity and interest rates.

Its latest run rate was $1.3 billion in revenue on $287 billion in transaction volume. Dividing the two gives about 0.45%. Put more simply, Airwallex reports roughly $4.50 in revenue for each $1,000 moving through the platform. Adyen’s full-year net revenue divided by its processed volume is closer to €1.70 per €1,000.

The comparison does not prove that Airwallex charges more efficiently. Airwallex includes a wider mix of FX, card and software revenue, while Adyen reports net revenue after several pass-through items.

Airwallex said it became cash-flow positive at the end of 2023. Since then, revenue has grown quickly, but the company has not published the detailed gross-margin, operating-profit and cash-flow information available from Adyen. Its recent appointment of a chief financial officer is timely. The next stage of the argument requires public-company-quality numbers, not another run-rate milestone.

The direction is convincing. The full economics are still hidden.

Q10Could Checkout.com become the next Stripe?

Checkout.com is currently the strongest private challenger to Stripe in online payments.

Airwallex remains the better answer to the broader “next Stripe” question. Checkout.com processed more than $300 billion during 2025, up 64%, and recorded net-revenue growth above 30% for the second year in a row. It also returned to full-year adjusted EBITDA profitability with a margin above 10%.

Among its more than 1,000 enterprise merchants, 63 now process at least $1 billion a year through the platform, up from 39 one year earlier.

Checkout.com is a big, functioning payments business. During the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period, it handled almost 100 million transactions worth $5.2 billion and reported 99.999% platform uptime for the year. Its US volume grew almost 70%, and approval for a Georgia limited-purpose bank charter should let it connect more directly to US card networks once operations are fully live.

Its route to customers is narrower. Checkout.com wins large merchants by improving acceptance rates, reliability and payment performance. Airwallex can enter through accounts, foreign exchange, supplier payments, employee cards, billing or embedded finance, then expand across the company.

Checkout.com could become Stripe’s most dangerous enterprise-payments competitor. To become the next Stripe in the wider sense, it needs many more developers choosing it without sales help and a broader financial-software relationship outside the checkout flow.

Q11Could Ramp become the next Stripe?

Ramp could become the biggest fintech success on this shortlist and still be the wrong answer to “who is the next Stripe?”

Ramp recently raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation. It serves more than 70,000 organizations, processes $200 billion in annualized purchases, and has more than 3,200 customers generating at least $100,000 in annualized revenue. A majority of customers use two or more Ramp products across cards, expenses, accounts payable, procurement, travel and treasury.

Ramp has built an outstanding software and distribution business. It enters through the finance department and keeps adding tools that control how a company spends money. Stripe usually sits where the company earns money: checkout, subscriptions, marketplaces, billing and payment infrastructure.

A recent product launch made the distinction unusually clear. Ramp chose Stripe’s Bridge and Privy infrastructure to power stablecoin bill payments and stablecoin accounts. Ramp owns the customer experience and the finance workflow; Stripe supplies the underlying wallet and stablecoin rails.

Ramp can expand into broader payments, and it may eventually be worth more than several payment processors. Today, its strongest products sit on top of infrastructure supplied by banks, card networks and, increasingly, Stripe itself.

Ramp looks more like the future operating system for finance teams than a universal payments platform.

Q12Is Adyen already Stripe’s closest rival?

Adyen is currently Stripe’s closest real-world rival.

People searching for the next Stripe are usually looking for a younger company that has not reached that stage yet. Adyen reported €2.36 billion in full-year net revenue, about €1.4 trillion in processed volume and €1.25 billion in EBITDA. Its 53% EBITDA margin is far beyond the disclosed profitability of the private contenders, and the company expects 20% to 22% constant-currency net-revenue growth during 2026.

Its product range is widening too. Issuing volume grew eightfold during 2025, while business accounts and cash-management products pushed Adyen toward what it calls end-to-end money movement. The company now covers money coming in, money being managed and money going out for large merchants and platforms.

Adyen’s culture and distribution differ from Stripe’s. Its strongest position is with major merchants and complex enterprise deployments. Stripe became the familiar default for startups and individual developers, then moved upmarket. Adyen reached comparable payment scale through the opposite route.

Adyen is the best proof that Stripe can face a peer at scale. Airwallex is the more plausible answer when the question asks which younger private company could follow a similar rise from infrastructure product to broad financial platform.

Q13Will AI agents and stablecoins reset the Stripe race?

AI agents and stablecoins are currently widening Stripe’s lead.

No newcomer has found a clean opening yet. Stripe said stablecoin payment volume on its platform doubled to about $400 billion during 2025, with businesses accounting for roughly 60%. Its Bridge acquisition gives it orchestration across currencies and chains, while Privy provides wallet infrastructure.

The recent Ramp launch shows those assets being sold to another leading fintech, not only to crypto companies.

Stripe is also connecting payments directly to AI platforms. It co-developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI, supports shopping experiences in ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, and recently worked with AWS on payments for AgentCore. At its latest product conference, Stripe introduced streaming payments that combine Metronome’s usage tracking with stablecoin micropayments for AI services.

Checkout.com is live with Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol and supports Visa and Mastercard’s agentic-payment frameworks. Airwallex has a logical role because agents will need wallets, spending controls, multiple currencies and cross-border settlement. Its Airi wallet and Agentic Commerce Suite point in that direction, but important features remain planned or in limited release.

For now, Stripe is winning this layer too. New payment rails have made licences, APIs, wallets and distribution more valuable, and Stripe already owns all four at large scale.

Q14What could stop Airwallex from becoming the next Stripe?

Airwallex can still lose this race through weak developer adoption, an unsuccessful US push, unclear economics or regulatory failures.

Regulation is the most immediate issue. Australia’s financial-intelligence regulator, AUSTRAC, ordered Airwallex to appoint an external auditor after raising concerns about transaction monitoring, customer due diligence and suspicious-matter reporting. The auditor was given 180 days to report. AUSTRAC’s public record still shows the audit order, with no published final outcome.

Airwallex has since appointed a new chief regulatory and compliance officer, strengthened local boards and added a chief financial officer. Those hires show that management understands the next stage will involve heavier scrutiny. They do not settle the questions underneath it.

The product roadmap creates another risk. Billing, accounting automation, treasury, agent wallets, expense agents and embedded finance all fit the broad vision, but they also stretch the organization across several difficult markets. Airwallex needs deep customer use across the new products. A long catalogue will not do the job by itself.

What could weaken the Airwallex case

Q15Who is the next Stripe?

Airwallex is currently the best answer to “who is the next Stripe?”

The succession itself is unfinished. Airwallex leads because the pieces reinforce one another. Cross-border licences support accounts and payments. Those money flows support cards, treasury and billing. The same infrastructure can then be embedded inside software platforms.

Recent growth and multi-product use show that customers are moving beyond a single transfer or foreign-exchange use case.

The alternatives each win a narrower argument. Checkout.com is stronger in pure enterprise payments. Ramp has the richer valuation and may build the best software for finance teams. Adyen already operates at near-peer scale with far better disclosed profitability. None currently matches Airwallex’s combination of rapid growth, global business finance and breadth.

Airwallex earns the full title only when developers start choosing it without a sales-led introduction, US startups adopt it early, and audited results show durable profits under regulatory scrutiny.

Until then, the judgment is straightforward. Airwallex leads the emerging field, but Stripe still has no true successor.